Tonight's red post collection includes Meddler's quick gameplay thoughts covering prototypes, gold funneling and more, as well as a new /Dev diary on Exploring Runeterra, rare icons now available for purchase, an update to the League Friends app, the Map team AMA, and much more!

Quick Gameplay Thoughts: July 25

These posts will often contain talk about future work we're doing, or planning to do, that isn't yet guaranteed to ship. The nature of the work could change or, depending on what we discover, projects mentioned may get delayed or even stopped. If you'd like to see a Tweet whenever a new one of these posts goes up: https://twitter.com/RiotMeddler

Prototypes

Something we've been thinking about a lot recently is how we could expose more of our work in progress directly to players. Hope there would be that early feedback on things that are still pretty rough could help us identify and fix problems, or, alternatively if something's really not working, help make the decision to kill it. We've tried such an approach a bit on the PBE this year, with work in progress on Quinn, Rengar, Fizz and LeBlanc exposed for feedback earlier than we normally would. That's gone pretty well. We’re going to try doing a bit more of it as a result, including for projects that aren’t just champion work. We’ll have some details to share next week for anyone interested in that side of things.

Gold Funneling

Since the 8.14 penalty to gold funneling got added jungle items we've been seeing two pain points in particular from it from regular jungle play:

Regular junglers who get ahead, usually off early kills/assists, who then get punished by it even though they're not the intended target.

Junglers who often prefer to not finish their jungle items, particularly those that split push later in the game.

We're looking at possible adjustments to the current penalty rules to reduce problems on one or both of those points. Possible there's something in 8.15, not certain yet at time of writing. Given the current penalty itself is a bandaid until pre-season if we do find an adjustment to make it's likely it's also a bandaid that gets removed come preseason when we get a better overall solution in.

Crit Item Changes

We've been continuing to work on crit item changes for 8.15 this week, with some shifts in what's likely to ship versus our thinking last week:

We're keeping Zeal items at 30% crit for now. We do want to address crit overcapping. Cutting Zeal crit amount however without also changing how IE works results in marksmen power curves getting pushed later, with more of a marksman's power coming from the second Zeal item spike. That clashes with one of bigger goals of moving some power from late game to early/mid game. We're keeping the crit overcapping in 8.15 at least as a result. We will address it, but didn't want to do so in a way that traded one cost for a larger one.

We've added an additional passive to IE, where it gives bonus damage on crits against minions/monsters. Not expecting the power from that to be too high, it does help both to give marksmen a bit of epic monster objective power back and improve satisfaction of a common basic action (AAing minions)

Not a crit item change, but a related one is that we're also increasing the cost of starting support items by 50g to reduce the number of pots a support brings with them to lane. We're doing that because we're seeing supports able to pressure non supports too hard early game due to the larger health pool they've got access to. Supports with inherent sustain and/or protective abilities (generally tanks and enchanters) are the ones we expect to be least affected by that change, given pots represent a smaller proportion of their available health."

We've got a modification to the gold funneling penalty in testing now that's likely to ship. It changes the penalty to apply when you have the most CS on the team, rather than the most gold. That removes cases where picking up a number of early kills/assists leaves junglers getting penalized. Split pushing potentially still gets hit later in the game if you're doing really well and not finishing your jungle item. Should be less of an issue too though.

My schedule's unusual today, so I'm posting this early. I'll have time to respond to one or two things, will come back a bit later in the day."

what does the data say about Hextech GLP-800? i rarely saw it on mages other than aurelion sol and after it no longer built out of catalyst he dropped it as well. personally id like a revert (building it on sona was amazing) but what would replace it as the third chapter item?

Yeah, its usage is pretty tiny and satisfaction with it is poor. We'll be trying some changes for a possible ship around pre-season. Likely needs more than just some number tweaks, hence that possible timing."

Meddler elaborated a little more on the topic of Prototypes, as well as something we'll see details on next week:

"Quote:

About the Prototypes: What do you mean about non-champion work? Something like pre-season changes or overall game system changes? And how do you want to share it? Like the champion changes? So that the result is that you have changes longer on a PBE or do you want to share stats,texts and videos,images etc of testbuilds to test it, but not ruin the testing of different things at the same time?

We'll get into a whole bunch of details next week. Basically we're going to try getting one project out there for public feedback when it's still in a pretty early state. See what reaction's like, how we can gather feedback, how interested people are in trying out something that's an unfinished prototype. Won't be in regular games of course, so if you're not interested you won't have to engage with it at all."

Hey, Fizz current ult really doesnt make sense with the reverted W. The ult requires him to shoot it from max range, because it was designed when he only needed to get one empowered auto attack off.Meanwhile his W requires him to stick to his target and auto attack multiple times.

Could we get that changed (ult partially reverted so that it does the same damage at all ranges and applies a 20% magic damage amp like old ult; while high range ults would still get rewarded with more CC and a bigger AOE) or are you done after the buffs next patch?

We'll be reducing the difference between different ult ranges in 8.15, bringing the AP ratios closer together (90% to 130%, instead of 60%-120%). We do want to keep some damage differential though so that trying for the riskier ult cases (longer range) still gives solid value when trying to burst down a target. Prior case where it was almost always optimal to point blank it removed a lot of the interest and benefit of the skill being a skillshot in the first place."

Meddleralso replied to a question about full 4K support, noting its being worked on:

"Quote:

Hey Meddler. Sorry for going a bit off topic but I wanted to ask whether there are any news about full 4k support? Now that the new cursor has been introduced, the only thing that makes the game unplayable in 4k are the small icons on the minimap. Have you considered going for some kind of a bandaid fix at least? Like upscaling the icons if higher resolution than 1080p is selected? It wouldn't matter if it was blurry. Thank you in advance and keep up the great work.

Ok, got some context. It is something that's being worked on, both on the code side and some work on the icons themselves. Can't make any promises about timeframe, but definitely coming."

Ask Riot: New Champions

This week's new Ask Riot is now available, covering how the position of a new champion is decided, what items go in their recommended page, and more:

There is a wide range of reasons a champion ends up in a specific position. In the past, it has largely been driven by our attempt to give a wide-variety of roles and classes to players each year. We’d look at what champions we were currently doing big VGUs on, as well as what the last champions released were, and then make sure all players got new champs or VGUs in their role.

Lately though, the number of champions has gotten so high that the demand of making unique and interesting mechanics has also risen.This has caused us to take a slightly different approach to selecting roles. We now start with an exciting or interesting design hook, such as “two champs specifically designed to have unique synergy,” and then after we validate it, we see what role it best fits in. Pyke is a champion that came from this new process, although for him the design hook was a “Support Assassin,” so the role was implicit in the gameplay hook.

You’ll see more champions in the future that started from this new process. That being said, we’d still try to make a champion for a specific role or class if we ever felt like a role was being neglected for a long period of time, since it always feels great to get a new champion in the role you play.

REAV3

Lead Producer of Champions

When creating a new champ, how do you decide on the items on the recommended page in the shop?

Recommended items are intended to guide players who are brand new to a champion. To that end, we typically recommend items that grant the most reliable access to the most common playstyles (we don’t tend to recommend off-builds). We also lean towards recommending simpler items that allow players to focus on the champion, which means we slightly lean away from active items.

To determine which items are optimal, we not only run a ton of playtests with a wide-range of players and skill levels, but we also have high-rated experts on the playtest team that become specialists on each new champion. With dozens of games of experience, these aces find the optimal item combinations and can share that knowledge with players on release.

RIOT JAG

Technical Game Designer

Just curious, how long does it take you to create the splash arts of new champions and skins?

As with many things it depends. Splashes can take anywhere from 3 weeks (of focused, heads-down time) to a couple months if it’s a high profile project with a long runway, like for base splashes or legendary skins. The average is 4 weeks, but that time isn’t spent exclusively painting. Most splash artists are also responsible for art-directing outsource artists (since there are only about 10 of us in-house, we need extra manpower to keep up with demand), providing hands-on paintovers for fellow illustrators on their splashes, and attending product meetings where we participate in the creative vision for champs and skins. Some artists are faster than others, but it’s been estimated that a splash usually takes 75–100 hours.

3RDCOLOSSUS

Illustrator, Champion Update

When a champion becomes strong because of a recent buff (particularly on new champion releases), how come completely different things are sometimes nerfed instead of just reverting the buff?

Whenever we buff or nerf a champion, we try to do so in ways that better accentuate the strengths and weaknesses of that champion—we call this “sharpening.” If we give a champion some power that ends up moving them too far and requires follow-up nerfs, unless it’s obvious that we REALLY overshot, our preference is to pull out power from aspects of a champ’s kit or base stats that better carve out a weakness. In doing so, we avoid moving towards a roster of generic champions that don’t have unique reasons to pick them.

Looking at Aatrox as a recent example, after release we shipped some buffs that adjusted the size of his Q hitbox after evaluation and feedback that he was too inconsistently getting his combos off. His Q is key to his identity as an early lane bully, so when it proved that he was TOO strong, we opted to nerf the damage of the ability (rather than revert him to a state where the Q would once again be too inconsistent) so that he could still perform in lane, but just not hit quite as hard. We also nerfed his base HP so that high-mobility champs who can better dodge and navigate around his combo could more successfully trade with him.

RIOT MAPLE NECTAR

Product Lead, Live Gameplay

Thanks for reading this week’s Ask Riot. Have a question?

Head over to Ask Riot and sign into your League account. Check out the Pro Tips, then ask away.

We promise to read every question, but we can’t guarantee they’ll all get answers. Some questions may already be answered elsewhere, and some won’t be right for Ask Riot. This isn’t the best place to announce new features, for example, and we might skip conversations on issues we’ve talked about in depth before (though we can clarify individual points).

We are listening, though, so keep asking. We’ll make sure your questions are heard by the Rioters working on the stuff you’re curious about."

League Friends: Now with News

Two years ago we launched League Friends, a mobile app designed to connect League players with their fellow summoners while outside of the game. Since launch, millions of you have installed and used the app and we are grateful for all of your feedback and support!

We are now looking at how we can improve and build on the League Friends experience.

As an initial first step, we are adding News to the app, which will pull the latest League of Legends news articles and serve them on your mobile devices. You can also choose to enable push-based notifications to stay up to date with the content you care about most.

The News feature is currently available to League Friends users (in regions where the app is available) on both the iOS and Android stores.

This is just the start of our plans for the app and we would love to hear what you think, as well as any cool ideas or features you would like to see in the future.

You can provide feedback through the app via the settings menu, or post comments below.

The League Friends team."

Map Team AMA

The team responsible for the newly released Runeterra Map did an AMA over on Reddit! As usual, community member Spideraxe has a roundup of questions and answers in a handy document!

"UPDATE: That's all for today folks! We'll pop in on occasion throughout the day but this concludes the main segment of the AMA.

Sup /r/leagueoflegends! We're the Rioters behind the most recently released Runeterra Map, here to answer your questions from the scorching sands of Shurima all the way to the frost bitten peaks of the Freljord.

We recently brought Runeterra to life by creating an interactive map that allows you to experience story content by creating your own journey. Check it out, then come back here and ask us anything.

That's fair. I understand your feels here. I can't give you anything more concrete atm except to let you know that we hear you, its on our radar and we want to bring more lore to our furry friends sooner than later

When ask about the 8.14 ARAM bug with Snowball, Riot Stephiroth shared a bit more on why the bug has been so hard to track down and the decision not to disabled Snowball temporarily:

"This is a long discussion we had but there's a few points specifically that stopped us from disabling Snowball.

The bug actually isn't 100% reproduction rate. It is pretty frequent, between 60-70% of the time, but it is not actually 100%.

The gameplay pattern impact for players who are hit by Snowball actually isn't changed much from seeing the bugged dash or not. If you see the Snowball hit and mark a minion or allied player, most players know there's a high potential for the enemy to dash. And you know where they're going to end up. It's obviously REALLY shitty, but after some adjustment, it could be played around since there's not a functionality change.

The champions bug is much worse than what Snowball does (given the above context), but the current champion count for how many exhibit the bug is about 40. Not all players own enough Champions for us to disable 40 of them and still be able to play the mode :(

We did also highly consider disabling ARAM altogether, but felt that was an overall worse experience.

I know this won't make you feel better about the situation, but I hope it gives you some insight into how we approached the problem."

I understand the frustrations of everyone playing ARAM right now, because ARAM is the mode I play the most. We are working on a fix and hoping to get it out to Live ASAP. "

Want more Esports? Check out these articles and video content from LolEsports:

Reminders

To round out this red post collection, here are a few reminders on current promotions or limited time events!

Dark Star Cho'Gath is now available, with 100% of proceeds going to regional charities! From now until August 10th, you can grab the skin, border, new summoner icons, and an emote! Check out our coverage for more!

The free skins promotions on Riot social media are heading to the vault! Check out the full details on this page to redeem Riot Girl Tristana, Dreadnight Garen, and Unchained Alistar before August 1st!